Dean Risa L. Goluboff

Risa Goluboff is the 12th, and the first female, dean of the University of Virginia School of Law. She is a renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century.

Goluboff is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Law Institute and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She received the Law School’s Carl McFarland Award for excellence in faculty scholarship in 2008, and the University of Virginia’s All-University Teaching Award in 2011. She is also a professor of history in the Corcoran Department of History, a faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and a faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. She chaired the University’s Deans Working Group, established to lead the University’s response to the events of Aug. 11-12, 2017. From 2011 to 2016, she directed the University’s J.D.-M.A. in History Program. Goluboff has served as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Columbia, Chicago and New York University law schools.

Before joining the Law School in 2002, Goluboff clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. She also served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa.